だいがく

June, 11

It was my second day in Jiyugaoka, Tokyo with Kosuke and his family and I decided to go to his University which is an hour and a half away by the way. We left from his house at 11:00 in the morning and walked for probably 20 mins to Jiyugaoka station. The neighborhood in Jiyugaoka is really cool, small streets, lots of flowers and just a nice looking area. Tokyo seems to be such a convenient area to bike in... I wish I had a bike now. Anyways, we got to the station, I bought a ticket. Kosuke used his Net pass (Metro pass?). Seems to be a cheap way to travel though I don't exactly understand it. While we were on the train Kosuke explained to me that his friends were crazy. I didn't know what he meant by that till I met them but they were really cool and glad to meet me as I was glad to meet them. I think we took 3 different trains and two different tickets to get to his college and spent about ¥400 doing it. Kosuke and I were walking down some stairs from the train station when a pretty Japanese girl started talking to him about something and she turned out to be his friend, Masumi. We ran into a few other friends of his before class. Kosuke's first class was a plant cell class I decided to use that time to explore his college and grab some food. I went to the cafeteria and wondered through the line looking at the food, prices and tried to decipher the kanji with no luck. I ended up get katsu, tofu (tofu W/fish flakes and scallions) and rice. All three of those things cost me a total of ¥390, that's really cheap. I knew that both katsu and tofu were normally served with sauce but I didn't know the word for "sauce" (It wasn't till later that I learned that the word for sauce is sauce)... plus I'm not able to read anything but Hiragana. Not too much is spelled with Hiragana and if it is it's mixed with kanji which is very hard (muzukashi). After my rather tasteless meal I walked around Kosuke's campus until his class was over. I met him in front of this one building surrounded by Japanese that were previously ignoring me that turned to be his friends and introduced themselves to me. I really like his friends their all pretty cool people and It was cool that they were so willing to get to know me. Trying to remember all their names was not easy then and because I'm writing this entry 3-4 days late I remember even fewer of them. Everyone had a 10 minute break before english class. Most of Kosuke's friends seemed to be asking about me or talking to me directly. Kosuke's English class was pretty interesting. One kid was studying his electronic dictionary, another was playing gameboy advance and others were talking to each other all while the lecture was going on.  I think the teacher knew that people did all this but he didn't really seem to care. I don't know if that means he's not interested in the success of his students or just that they're repeated trouble makers. There were a select few people that had to read from this one book in English and when it came Kosuke's turn he told me to read it in very broken English but I understood him. As I started to read it to the class the students started laughing as they heard clear English minus the Japanese accent. I didn't really understand what was going on but it seemed as though that wasn't cool but you couldn't really tell from the teacher. The students thought it was hilarious though. Kosuke had to read it anyways. After class we hung out with Kosuke's friends for about 2-3 hours at his university. Masumi san from earlier approached me and started to talk to me as Kosuke was chatting with his other friends. Her English was really good I thought. After a while another of Masumi's friends came over and became the third in our group. After about 30 minutes in the hall we decided to go outside and we ran into even more of his friends. I now had 4 girls asking me questions about various things like who I thought the most attractive guy of the male group was. I thought it was a bit strange but I thought it would be Kosuke. Turns out Kosuke is very popular so my answer was correct I guess. Apparently he's very popular with the girls. One of the girls asked me who I thought the most attractive of the girls were. This became very awkward as I didn't want to offend anyone. I decided to go with "I think so many of the Japanese girls I've seen are pretty so it's really hard to choose"... Anyways It was really fun talking to them and making new friends. It started to get dark and the four people left including Kosuke and I decided to go home. After the second train Masumi went one way and we went the other. As Kosuke and I were walking home after the hour and a 1/2 train ride we stopped by a convenient store of which Japan has plenty of. I got some sweet potato yokan which was pretty good. 

June, 14th, I gotta get going and help with breakfast now at Canadian farm in Nagano.